LEIDEN, The Netherlands—MIMETAS and Roche recently announced the development of a novel organ-on-a-chip system to aid in assessing intestinal permeability in perfused 3D gut tubules in high throughput under exposure to pharmacological compounds. The researchers grew more than 350 gut tubules under flow that formed leak-tight structures and could be tested for intestinal barrier function in real-time via automated microscopy and image analysis. The tubules were also polarized and demonstrated increased expression of specific transporters and receptors. As noted in a MIMETAS press release, this new high-throughput technology is expected to offer new options for toxicology testing as well as disease modeling and assessing compound transport. The results of this collaborative work were published in Nature Communications.